


leave me to dream

by citadelofswords



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, assuming what i think happens at the end of the raven king happens, other character is a spoiler, post The Raven King
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:11:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citadelofswords/pseuds/citadelofswords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s no Ronan, and fear is curling in Adam’s gut. Ronan had started driving more recklessly than usual after Gansey… after <em>Gansey.</em> They’d been spending every free moment together, since Noah didn’t show himself and Blue had left. Adam hadn’t thought that Ronan wanted to die. Maybe had had been wrong.</p>
<p>He talks to the officers and calls the insurance company and watches them tow the wreckage of the BMW out of the ditch. It’s totaled. Ronan could afford a new one. Ronan could dream a new one.</p>
<p>If Ronan is alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	leave me to dream

**Author's Note:**

> Uh. I wanted to write something kind of sad. "I thought you were dead" was the line that started this whole thing. I wasn't doing very well the night I wrote this, so a lot of the feelings I was having got channeled into the characters a little bit, and this was born.
> 
> Note: This fic assumes that Maggie is going to kill off Gansey at the end of the Raven King. It is also unbeta'd and named for a line from Dream by Imagine Dragons, which is one of the biggest Ronan songs I have ever heard in my life.

They call Adam, because apparently his name is also on the car’s registration.

He takes the entire drive in a white knuckled grip. When he finally sputters to a halt, the entire place is lit up like the Fourth of July. He parks, counts the number of police cars, tries to get his breathing under control, and scans.

There’s no Ronan, and fear is curling in Adam’s gut. Ronan had started driving more recklessly than usual after Gansey… after _Gansey_. They’d been spending every free moment together, since Noah didn’t show himself and Blue had left. Adam hadn’t thought that Ronan wanted to die. Maybe had had been wrong.

He talks to the officers and calls the insurance company and watches them tow the wreckage of the BMW out of the ditch. It’s totaled. Ronan could afford a new one. Ronan could dream a new one.

If Ronan is alive.

He never got into the ambulance. The officers haven’t seen him, but they promise to search, which means they’re going to drive away now and come back when it isn’t four in the morning, by which point it could be too late, if it isn’t too late already.

He winds up at Monmouth. _Monmouth_ , of all places, as if he hasn’t been trying to avoid Monmouth since Gansey and Cabeswater. Since Blue stole Gansey’s journal and the keys to the Pig and took off; since Noah vanished and refused to come out.

When he stumbles into Monmouth, Gansey’s Henrietta is still strewn across the floor, but Aglionby looks like Godzilla trampled it. Adam looks at the steeple of St. Agnes and says, “Fuck.”

Then, he whirls around and punches the wall right next to the door, feeling the skin split on his knuckles. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. There’s blood on his knuckles and Ronan’s not here and Blue’s not here and he doesn’t know what to do.

The lock on Ronan’s room clicks. Chainsaw flies out of the room and circles Adam’s head. “Parrish,” Ronan’s voice says, as if he hasn’t been in a car crash, as if Adam hadn’t just punched a wall from freaking out. As if Adam knew he was here all along.

Adam doesn’t turn around. “You fucker,” Adam manages, and swings his other hand back to punch the wall again.

Ronan catches his hand before Adam can make contact with the brick, and Adam stumbles, unbalanced. “No,” Ronan says roughly. “Let me see your hand.”

Adam turns around and Ronan takes Adam’s injured hand in both of his and examines it carefully, with the expression he reserves for studying Adam when he thinks Adam isn’t looking. He’s not wearing a shirt, and there’s thin cuts up and down his chest and across his shoulders— Adam wouldn’t be surprised if they carry over onto his back. He looks like he crashed through several miles of bramble.

“I don’t think anything’s broken,” Ronan muses. “Let me just clean it out first.”

He drags Adam (pliant, unwilling to blink for fear of waking up) into the bathroom, where he gestures to the toilet seat. Adam sits silently, stares at the gauze wrapped around Ronan’s forearms and the bloodstains on the floor. He feels sick to his stomach.

Ronan kneels in front of him with a wet rag, wiping the blood off Adam’s knuckles. “What’s with your face?” he asks. “Looks like something died under your nose.”

Adam tries to relax his face and doesn’t make eye contact. He refuses to, because if he does he’ll either punch him or kiss him, and he wants to do both and neither at the same time.

“Parrish— _Adam_.” Ronan says, and Adam looks up sharply.

“I thought,” he begins, and huffs out a breath. “I thought you were,” _dead_ , he wants to say, but the word sticks in the back of his throat. He hasn’t been able to say it since Gansey. And the truth is, Ronan could very well have been dead— could have died when the night horror had sliced his wrists open and they all thought he’d tried to commit suicide, could have died when he went to beat up Adam’s father, could have died when he faced Kavinsky down to get Matthew back. Could have died in Cabeswater. Could have died tonight, in that damn ditch, and he wouldn’t have known til the morning because the police had left the scene—

Ronan places the rag on the floor and frames Adam’s face in his hands, fingers splaying from his cheekbones down below his jaw. Adam refocused on Ronan’s face. It was softening, his smirk turning downwards, into a carefully neutral, serious expression. “Parrish,” he says, gently, and it’s only the second time Adam has ever heard Ronan be gentle towards someone. “Don’t you know how hard it is to kill me?”

Adam knows. He doesn’t like to think about Ronan’s voice that terrible night, begging for Chainsaw to rip his heart out even while she sadly _kerrah’d_ on Blue’s shoulder. It was the one and only time he’d ever seen Ronan cry, and it had been the worst experience of his life.

“After Gansey,” he says, slowly, and Ronan’s breath stops. “After Gansey, I don’t know anymore.”

Ronan’s thumbs trace Adam’s cheekbones once, and then drop to his injured hand where it rests on his knee. Ronan lifts Adam’s hand and kisses the knuckles; just a light press of lips that makes Adam’s heart glow for a moment. “Never,” he promises. “ _Never_ , okay? I would never have left. Noah might not be speaking to us, Blue might have left, but none of them would want me to go. And I don’t want to go. I have too much here.”

He doesn’t break eye contact with Adam. The entire room is electrically charged; Adam can feel the tiniest movement, each breath, and so he feels the second kiss to his knuckles, harder this time. Ronan still doesn’t look away.

He’s _still alive_. Adam lets out a shaky breath and closes his eyes.

They don’t speak for a long while after that. Ronan wraps up Adam’s knuckles and shoves him in the direction of his room so he can shower in peace. Adam doesn’t leave, instead presses his back to the bathroom door to listen to Ronan absently hum the murder squash song while under the spray. When the water shuts off, Adam scrambles to Ronan’s mattress to make it look like he was trying to sleep, but Ronan steps back into the room and eyes him with an amused expression on his face.

“Nice try,” he grins, and flops down onto the bed next to Adam with a wince. “I know you’re faking it.”

Adam lays his uninjured hand in the space between him and Ronan. Ronan lays his own hand on top of it, absently tangling their fingers together.

“I don’t think you need to go to the hospital,” he says. “But we should anyway. Just to make sure.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Ronan Lynch?” Adam jokes, but he leans forwards and presses his lips to Ronan’s knuckles, because he has a name for the feeling in his gut when Ronan wasn’t at the site of his crashed BMW, and he’s not afraid of it anymore.

Ronan’s breath catches in his throat and his eyes go impossibly wide, but the effect is ruined when he yawns. Adam laughs.

“Will you be here?” Ronan asks, and Adam thinks back to the last time he was at Monmouth, after the last time they went to Cabeswater, when Blue stole the Pig and Adam left at 5 am because he couldn’t spend another second in Gansey’s empty bed. He shakes his head, and then realizes Ronan’s fingers are trembling.

“No,” Adam says. “I’m staying.”

 

* * *

 

Adam wakes up curled around Ronan in the morning. His injured fingers are throbbing where Ronan’s rolled on top of them, but Ronan has his face mashed into Adam’s collarbone and his arm draped over Adam’s shoulder, and their hands are still intertwined between them. Adam hasn’t the heart to wake him to ask him to move.

So he stays as still as he possibly can, which turns out to be a bad decision because then Ronan wakes up, his jaw closing with a tiny snap as he pulls away from Adam a little bit so they can see eye to eye.

His eyes open, and Adam’s entire chest feels warm.

“Good morning,” he murmurs. “Can I kiss you?”

Ronan’s breath catches and he nods once, jerky, as though he doesn’t believe it’ll actually happen. So Adam leans down to kiss Ronan. As if it’s something they do every day. As if this isn’t Adam’s first kiss.

When Adam pulls away again, Ronan is staring up at him with shock etched across his face, but his fingers are tangled in the hairs at the nape of Adam’s neck. Adam prays he hasn’t done something wrong, but then Ronan’s face splits into a grin and he leans up and clumsily bumps their mouths together again, unable to properly kiss him from smiling so hard.

“Good morning,” Ronan says, and then, “I love you,” because apparently Ronan Lynch is a giant sap.

Adam thinks that if Ronan greeted him like that for the rest of his life, he could die happy.

“Breakfast?” Adam mumbles against Ronan’s lips, and both boys are untangling themselves from the covers, Ronan scrambling to find a shirt to wear, Adam unwrapping the gauze around his injured fingers.

“Will you let me kiss you again after?” Ronan asks, and Adam looks up at him.

“I’ll let you kiss me for the rest of our lives, probably,” he says, and Ronan’s entire face lights up.

“Okay,” Adam says, rewrapping his hand, as Ronan hunts for his keys amongst the wreckage of Gansey’s Henrietta. “What happened last night, if you weren’t trying to—,”

“Something jumped out of the trees,” Ronan shrugs. “I thought it was a deer, but the more I think about it, it looked like a person. I yanked the wheel and skidded off road. Dove out of the car before it smashed into a tree. Then I just hightailed it back here.”

Adam blinks. “You think you almost hit a person? Do you know what they looked like? Maybe we could find them again.”

“Nah,” Ronan says, triumphantly emerging with his keys. “Whoever they are, they’re probably long gone by now.”

With that, he strides to the door and yanks it open— only to find Gansey, fist raised as though to knock. Adam’s breath leaves him in a whoosh.

“What,” Ronan says.

“Is that all you have to say after you almost ran me down last night?” Gansey huffs, folding his arms. “Also, did you change the locks or something? My key didn’t work.” His eye catches on Adam, standing in the wreckage of Aglionby, and then he sees the model. “ _What have you done to my town?_ ”

“WHAT.” Ronan yelps.

Adam can’t help it— he bends double, laughing. 

**Author's Note:**

> [Come say hello?](http://citadelofswords.tumblr.com)


End file.
